Fever Season (12 page)

“There’s absolutely nothing to be worried about,” added Catherine Clisson, friend to both Dominique and January’s mother, still the plaçée of the protector who’d taken her under his wing twenty years ago. “We sent as soon as her water broke, but with first babies these things take time.” As she spoke she brought extra candles from the dresser drawer. Nearly every candlestick and holder in the house stood on its marble top, a bright regiment of porcelain and silver drawn up for battle.

“Is my mother here?”

“Livia said she would be shortly, when she’s finished her dinner.”

Madame Clisson sounded like a woman carefully keeping her personal opinions out of her voice. But her statement didn’t surprise January in the least. Having lavished on Dominique all the care and attention of which she scanted her two older—and darker-hued—children, Livia Levesque seemed to have lost interest in the girl once she’d negotiated a suitably cutthroat contract for her with the wealthiest white planter Livia could find. She herself owned a neat four-room cottage in the pines on the other side of the Washington Hotel, here in Milneburgh, but rented it out at an extortionate rate to a white sugar broker, and occupied a pleasant room at the Louisiana House, which catered to well-off merchants and landlords of color.

“I hope everything’s well with your sister Olympe?” Madame Clisson handed him a towel, and folded back the wide lace cuffs of her sleeves. “We sent for her as well.”

“She might be with Nicole Perret.”

Dominique’s friend Phlosine Seurat came in from the
gallery in a froufrou of pink jaconet. “I don’t think Nicole Perret—was she the one who’s going to stay with M’sieu Louis Corbier?—I don’t think she’s come.” She closed the shutters carefully behind her, for the night was coming on, and drew the curtains over it.

“Nonsense, darling.” Dominique turned her head from the pillows. “I saw all their baggage carried into M’sieu Corbier’s this afternoon.”

January related his dinner at Olympe’s while shedding his coat, then herded Phlosine and Iphègénie—Dominique’s other bosom friend—from the room, keeping Clisson to help him with the examination. Quite a number of New Orleans planters and brokers paid to bring their plaçées as well as their white families out of the city, especially if there were children involved. Iphègénie Picard and Phlosine Seurat had walked over from their own painted cottages to support their friend through her confinement, bringing blancmanges, terrines, and lemonade.

Pretty women, all of them, beautifully turned out in their summery muslins and lawns, silk tignons folded and tied and trimmed for maximum allure.
And why not?
thought January, remembering the girls at Rose Vitrac’s little school, and the different, harder road they were being shown.

Interesting a wealthy protector was a sure way to establish oneself, to acquire a little property, a little security in the world, without losing one’s eyesight to dressmaking or one’s youth to hard labor. Even the respectable wives of artisans, the free colored ladies who refused to let their daughters play with the daughters of the plaçées, envied the plaçées their ease and their wealth. He thought of Marie-Neige’s older sisters, educated in the more womanly arts of music and conversation, as his sister Dominique had been. Powdered and painted and dressed in silk, they
were already being escorted by their mother to the Blue Ribbon Balls.

And why not?
He looked around him at the tiny room, the plain but gracefully expensive furnishings, the curtains of sprigged English chintz and the linen sheets starched and ironed by servants’ hands.
Why not?

Dominique would never have to fear for herself, or for the child she was now bringing into the world, thanks to his mother’s hardheaded bargaining.

She was further in labor than Clisson had thought, further than she had shown while her friends were in the room. She lay back in the cushions of the cypress-wood bed while January examined her, and he saw her hand grip hard on the sheets. Once she whispered, “She’ll be a little octoroon, my petite. So pretty …”

Hearing the wistfulness in her voice, January didn’t ask,
Would you love her less were she darker?
Grief and questions were not what Minou needed now. Instead he jested, “What, you’re not going to give Henri a boy? With spectacles like his and no chin?”

As he hoped, it made her smile. “Wicked one, Henri has too got a chin! In fact several,” she added, and her burst of giggles dissolved into another whisper of pain.

“Where is Henri?” he asked Madame Clisson, as he and she left the bedroom a few minutes later. He’d examined Dominique two or three times in the past several months and had conferred with Olympe and anticipated no major problems with the labor itself. But the child had grown in the two weeks since he’d seen his sister last, and he guessed she’d have a difficult time.

“The Hotel St. Clair.” Agnes Pellicot and her daughter Marie-Anne—a shy tall girl in her first year of plaçage to a planter’s son—had joined Phlosine and Iphègénie in the parlor. With them were Dominique’s maid Thèrése,
and January and Dominique’s mother, the redoubtable Widow Livia Levesque.

“That mother of his is giving a concert and ball.” The Widow Levesque uncovered Phlosine’s blancmange, regarded it with a single downturned corner of her mouth, and with her free hand rearranged the decorative sprig of leaves that crowned its smooth, ivory-colored dome. She replaced the bell-shaped glass cover with a sniff, as if to say,
Well, that’s the best that can be expected of
that. “Like her, to pick the same night as the Musicale for the benefit of that heathen preacher the Americans are holding at the Washington, but there! The woman would have scheduled her own funeral rather than let the Americans have a sou for that vulgar heretic. I trust she will have her reward in heaven,” she added dryly, contemplating the terrine. “You used chicken liver for this, Iphègénie? I thought as much.”

The inflection of her voice was the same one with which she had turned every small triumph of January’s childhood into a commonplace.
Dr. Gomez says you will make a fine physician one day? I expect he would say that
. Slender and delicate in appearance, Livia Levesque had put off her mourning for her late husband as soon as the obligatory year was up on the grounds that black did not become her—few women of color looked really good in it—but still dressed soberly. To hear her talk, she had never been any white man’s plaçée, let alone a slave and the wife of a slave. January could never remember hearing her speak of his father.

“Don’t tell me the girl’s going to give you problems?” Livia turned immense, wine brown eyes upon her son.

“I don’t think so.” January kept his voice low and glanced at the half-open bedroom door. “But she’s in for a good deal of pain and struggle, I think.”

“Hmph.” There was a world of,
Not like
my
pain
, in
the single expulsion of her breath. “Fine time for that other girl of mine to be lollygagging in town. Thèrése, extinguish some of these candles! The waste that goes on in this house is shocking. And beeswax, too! I don’t see how M’sieu Viellard puts up with it. I suppose you think you need to fetch him.”

“Someone should,” said January. “It should be …”

“I can manage here,” his mother cut him off coolly. “How far along is she? Is that all? Phlosine”—She looked around, but the girl had vanished fairylike into her friend’s bedroom—“Never there when you need them. No more sense than butterflies.” She turned her cool gaze back to her son. “You can’t suppose that any of those girls are going to be admitted anywhere near a ball at the St. Clair, do you?”

As if,
he thought,
she hadn’t been one of those girls herself

When he left she was ordering Madame Clisson and Thèrése to bring in two dining-room chairs and a plank, to approximate a birthing-chair if Olympe didn’t arrive in time.

The Hotel St. Clair stood amid lush plantations of banana, jasmine, willow, and oak some distance back from the lakefront; but its galleries opened to both the prospect and the breezes that came off the water. As he and the groom Cyrus approached the graceful block of brick and whitewashed stucco that was the main hotel, January saw that colored paper lanterns were suspended from the galleries and smudges of lemongrass and tobacco burned near all the windows against the ever-present mosquitoes. Though it was by this time nearly nine o’clock, well after the hour that entertainments began, as he came up the garden’s white shell path he heard no music, only the dull
muttering of voices, and an occasional woman’s exclamation of anger and outrage.

The first-floor gallery was thronged with little knots of people, the men in black or gray or blue evening dress, the women in the pale-tinted silks of summer wear—and the looped, knotted, wired, and lace-trimmed hairstyles they favored these days that made January wonder despairingly if women had taken leave of their senses in the past ten years—sipping negus and lemonade from trays circulated by white-coated waiters.

“Honestly, the woman deserves to be horsewhipped!” wailed someone buried to her chin in a snowbank of lace, whom January vaguely recognized as an aunt (cousin?) of Phlosine Seurat’s protector. Through his mother and Minou he was being reintroduced to the interlocking webs of Creole society gossip.

“Well, what can you expect of Americans?” returned her escort, as January skirted the shell path under the gallery. He sought the inevitable refreshment tables, whose colored waiters he could approach without violating anybody’s sensibilities.

“Well, we know who’s responsible, anyway,” muttered another woman, patting the yellow roses in her hair under an extravagant Apollo knot. “And her husband only dead a week Wednesday!”

“I always said she was a cold hussy.…”

“I’ve heard she doesn’t have shoes on her feet, poor thing.…”

“And well served, I say! I’m told she led the poor man a dreadful life.…”

“…  gambled away every sou …”

“…  no more than twenty-five cents on the dollar, they say!”

At the far end of the wide gallery that fronted the lake
January spotted the buffet, framed in a glowing galaxy of hanging lanterns, candles, and potted ferns. As he approached, above the growl of the crowd he finally heard music, a wistful planxty spun like gold thread from a single violin. He followed it to its source. The violinist perched tailor-fashion on one of the tall stools set behind the buffet for the use of the waiters, a bottle of champagne within easy reach and a dreamy expression in his black-coffee eyes. The gallery wasn’t particularly high at that point, and January was a tall man. He caught the balusters, put a foot on the edge of the gallery, and swung himself up. One of the waiters called out, “Well, here’s an answer to M’am Viellard’s prayer now. You bring your music with you, Maestro?”

“I’m looking for Monsieur Viellard.” January stepped over the rail. “What’s happening here?”

The violinist set aside his instrument and generously offered him the bottle of Madame Viellard’s best champagne. “Departed in command of a force to rescue the captives,” he reported. Hannibal Sefton’s white face was a trifle haggard but he seemed in better health than when January had seen him a week ago. With his long brown hair tied back in a green velvet ribbon and his shabby, old-fashioned coat, the fiddler had the look of something strayed from a portrait painted half a century ago.
“He armed his trained servants, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them into Dan
. The guests turned up half an hour ago to discover that the Committee in charge of the Musicale for the Benefit of the Reverend Micajah Dunk had hired away every musician but me and Uncle Bichet. Madame Viellard’s fit to burst a corset string and she’s gone to the Washington Hotel—with Our Boy Henri in tow—to get them back.”

January swore. “I’d have thought that at this time of
year there were at least enough musicians in town for two concerts on the same evening. Even if one of them does have to feature Philippe de Coudreau on the clarinet.”

Hannibal winced at the mention of one of the worst musicians of the rather slender selection available, even at the best of times, in New Orleans, and shrugged. “You reckon without the necessity of showing up the Americans. Madame Viellard heard that the Committee to Buy a Church for Micajah Dunk was having a Musicale to raise money—and Dunk being a hellfire lunatic who believes the Devil is French makes it all worse—and moved her concert and ball up to the same evening, to make sure that anybody with any pretentions to society in Milneburgh came to
her
party and didn’t drop money at the Musicale when the collection plate went around. That would have settled the Musicale’s hash, except that the Committee that’s running it is headed by a lady rejoicing in the name of Emily Redfern, who’s damned if she’s going to let herself get shown up by French heathens who keep the Sabbath the way people in Boston keep the Fourth of July. The result being that Mrs. Redfern upped her Musicale to include an orchestra that would shame the Paris Opera.”

He poured out a glass of champagne for January; he drank his own from the bottle. “La Redfern offered me twice what Madame Viellard did—enough to keep me in opium for weeks. I strongly suspect old Reverend Hellfire isn’t going to get a whole lot of money once expenses are met, but I also suspect that’s no longer the point.”

“Wonderful.” January sighed, too used to the rivalries between Creole society and the lately come Americans to even attempt to argue the matter logically. Maybe Madame Lalaurie
had
been trying to pick her rival Redfern’s pocket.

“So if you’ve got your music with you, Maestro,”
added Uncle Bichet, a thin old freedman who still bore on his face the tribal scarrings of the African village where he’d been born, “I opine you can make a good five dollar this evenin’—or ten, if you want to walk over by the Washington and play the piano there.”

“Not this evening.” January reflected ruefully that tonight was the only occasion in the past ten years on which he stood to make more from his medical skills than from his piano playing. “But I do need to go to the Washington, if that’s where Monsieur Viellard’s to be found. Hannibal, can I beg your assistance?” At a Creole society ball, January knew, a man of color could enter without problems, provided he knew his place and kept to it. But the matter would almost certainly be otherwise at a function given largely by Americans.